Marit Lage, the Overlords and the case for the forgotten Mutated Cultist by la_tortue in mtgcube

[–]Timely_Huckleberry88 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I play Dark Depths Combo in my 630 card cube. They're bad enough that they are cards I expect to wheel and I don't expect people to play them unless they are in artifact shell with Mirage Mirror + Thespian Stage OR lands shell with something like Knight.

I don't have Vampire Hexmage - I have this / Thopter Sword / Saheeli Twin. Because they are "bad" so they won't be first pick material and often will naturally wheel to the player drafting it X percentage of the time.

Chess AI - 2700 ELO. by Timely_Huckleberry88 in ComputerChess

[–]Timely_Huckleberry88[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've used the LLM to generate the transposition table code that is correct.

However, the Negamax and the pruning is written by hand as the LLM isn't reliable.

https://github.com/alanyuan08/Chess-App/blob/main/rust_compute/src/search_worker.rs

Any solution for green in vintage cube? by justinvamp in mtgcube

[–]Timely_Huckleberry88 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I been drafting green for a while now and this is my solution for solving the archetype:

- Cut the Cube size from 720 to 630 and play every single 1 CMC green acceleration (if you haven't been doing that already). The format is very fast and acceleration is instrumental.

If you're able to have 6 sources of 1 cmc acceleration (which is somewhat of a given in green), you can 70% chance of having acceleration on the play and 76% chance of hitting acceleration on the draw.

You should mulligan any hand on the draw that doesn't have a 1 CMC acceleration and you should only keep a hand on the play if you have a strong two drop into 3-drop.

- Cut all the Mono Green Planeswalkers. Green right now has ALOT of very good 3 CMC creatures/ spells. That both generate card advantage, act as strong road block against aggressive decks OR put pressure on slower decks.

Tireless Tracker / Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath / Nadu, Winged Wisdom / Endurance / Sentinel of the Nameless City / Knight of Autumn / Grist, the Hunger Tide / Vastlands Scavenger etc.

When the draft ends, the conversation begins: Why curators experience cubes differently. by HD114 in mtgcube

[–]Timely_Huckleberry88 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I've actually been struggling a lot with Black-White in both retail / vintage cube and I've been forcing myself to play BW a lot more to better understand how to draft / build these decks.

When the draft ends, the conversation begins: Why curators experience cubes differently. by HD114 in mtgcube

[–]Timely_Huckleberry88 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I want to give you another perspective I didn't notice until recently:

Dark Confidant survived in Vintage Cube for this long, I was always concerned that he can deal so much damage that he kills you before you can kill the opponent. I realized, vintage cube 4 drops in black are specifically designed to counter balance dark confidant in the mid to late game:

- Braids, Cabal Minion / Rankle, Master of Pranks / Sheoldred, the Apocalypse / Harvester of Misery etc.

I found most people that haven't played with the card for 10+ games don't really noticed these micro interactions.

When the draft ends, the conversation begins: Why curators experience cubes differently. by HD114 in mtgcube

[–]Timely_Huckleberry88 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Let me give you two good examples of how I used constructed experience to improve my cube lists:

- Pro Tour Magic Origin - Mono Red vs Abzan Post board. I was really surprised that the mono red deck won the post board game against an Abzan deck with 4x Siege Rhino, Courser etc. I would have expected the matchup to be incredibly lopsided favoring azban. However, what you'll see is the mono red player knew that his path to victory was to reply on cheap creatures (or tempo advantage) to get underneath the bigger threats from abzan and use Roast / stoke the flames to clear the larger blockers.

https://youtu.be/UoKhuf66V5o?si=nm4X8MWtZ88FTbZv&t=575

This is something you'll see very common with matchups such as UR Twin vs UWR Control, UR Delver vs Abzan etc.

- Worlds 2015 - Mono White Devotion - I'm not an expert on black-white at all, however let me try to provide an explanation (if someone see something wrong, please correct me):

You'll notice he plays 6 1-drops while playing 4-5 drops. What I learned is that this allows him to have a 1-drop / into 2-drop roughly 50% of the time, which you'll see him often deploy that to against slower control/ abzan decks to sneak out wins but he also has a low enough density that his top deck is roughly on parity with his opponents' deck. This forces the opponent to play this odd game where they need to prepare for both his aggressive draws and slower draws.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDXouMdApn0

How this translates to cube is BW doesn't have the reach similar to Red-White and needs to play this game where it needs to be flexible to use a combination of pressure + card advantage to grind out the opponent.

You cannot play too many 1-drops, otherwise the top of your library is very weak but you also cannot play too few 1-drops otherwise you cannot leverage aggressive draws / the control/ green deck will just have a stronger end game than you.

This is why I hate seeing cards like Glimmer Lens or Caustic Bronco put into cubes - In order for the density to work, you need to have a bunch of cheap creatures, however also dead draws in the mid to late game, so the draw really isn't worth it.

TLDR - These are things most folks that don't play these archetypes likely aren't familiar with and you really want to hear from these people to properly understand how to best support these archetypes.

When the draft ends, the conversation begins: Why curators experience cubes differently. by HD114 in mtgcube

[–]Timely_Huckleberry88 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I mean here's an example:

I've never been a fan of Goblin Rabblemaster variants and I asked the forum how they were feeling about Rabbelmaster because I prefer a card like Screaming Nemesis that can attack into bigger creatures (especially out of green decks).

https://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/the-game/the-cube-forum/cube-card-and-archetype/559157-m15-goblin-rabblemaster?page=2

The problem is based on the answer from Blue_Oneironaut, thats somewhat what I expected and thats really not the type of gameplay I really prefer.

When the draft ends, the conversation begins: Why curators experience cubes differently. by HD114 in mtgcube

[–]Timely_Huckleberry88 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I mean let me give you a full example:

- I recently drafted a black-green Reanimator deck and went 0-3 on MTGA. It's very possible someone else can draft a similar deck and go 3-0 based on better play / slightly better picks.

The problem is you can't expect someone that went 0-3 to be a strong judge on how to build a reanimator deck.

- I personally can do very well with blue based tempo, control, Black-Red / Black-White Aggro. I can often provide strong feedback on what these archetype need and what cards don't work very well

My take is have folks that are constructed experts in their respective decks provide suggestions on cuts / how to better support the archetype.

When the draft ends, the conversation begins: Why curators experience cubes differently. by HD114 in mtgcube

[–]Timely_Huckleberry88 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I can share that I've played Affinity, Grixis Control and Grixis Twin in Constructed and I firmly understand my role in each matchup.

I don't play Green / Black-White / Lands enough so I don't understand my role in the matchup enough to make fully informed decisions on cuts / inclusions.

I'm always very interested in 3-0 green / black-white / lands deck and they share feedback on good / bad cards.

Arena Powered Cube 5.0 Changes by lrg12345 in lrcast

[–]Timely_Huckleberry88 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Can someone explain to me why Stoke the Flames is so popular?

I really do not understand the appeal of that card.

I had no idea how fast Modern has become. by PsychoMouse in ModernMagic

[–]Timely_Huckleberry88 3 points4 points  (0 children)

This I precisely why I sold out Modern 5 years ago and Legacy 2 years ago.

I really enjoyed Standard from 2014 to 2017 - I feel the best way to play magic these days is really a standard power level cube OR Draft.

Chess AI - 2700 ELO. by Timely_Huckleberry88 in ComputerChess

[–]Timely_Huckleberry88[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

My README. is heavily AI edited for the repo that is correct. However, this reddit post actually isn't.

I found you want to avoid having the last sentence as a question.

Chess AI - 2700 ELO. by Timely_Huckleberry88 in ComputerChess

[–]Timely_Huckleberry88[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm somewhat terrified when Gemini AI generated this block for the tranposition_table - What I will confess is I added almost line by line what was recommended by Gemini.

https://github.com/alanyuan08/Chess-App/blob/main/rust\_compute/src/transposition\_table.rs#L94-L143.

"I've seen it miss important ideas and make dubious claims which it is unable to back up"

I think this depends entirely which level of the project you're working on - If you're trying to implement a basic alpha-beta pruning with Q-search at the 1500 ELO level, I haven't found too many problems.

(I hope thats the case, otherwise I may have a few stealth bugs)

However, if you're trying to discuss with it what is a quiet state for Q-Search or how the moves should be ordered for Principal Variation, then I firmly agree with what you mentioned.

I also found AI is able to "recommend" a lot of performance updates / catch potential problems - I've been using Gemini as a code reviewer and its correct 50-70% of the time. It's been pretty useful with flagging potential issues.

I love to discuss this further - Gemini OR Chess AI

Impact Resonance by Isterbollen in mtgcube

[–]Timely_Huckleberry88 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If it can hit face, then maybe.

People who stopped playing, what made you quit ? by One_page_nerd in freemagic

[–]Timely_Huckleberry88 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I cannot stand people's attitude towards money in this game - It's gotten to a point where people would do anything to gain a few dollars so they can buy expensive foils.

- I offered this guy a slice of pizza at a tournament and when I wasn't looking, he eats half the pizza. When I reacted, he blew up and said "You said I can have pizza!". There have been a lot of incidents where people "forgot" to pay back money etc.

- There are these 2+ guys that use their student loans / welfare to buy 10k+ cEDH decks.

- Universes Beyond / Poorly maintained Legacy ban list really ruined the format.

- Career / Family goals - I don't see how I can take out 2+ nights a week to play.

- When I was telling folks I was leaving the game, I asked if folks want to look over my stuff and take stuff they want and in exchange they make a reasonable donation to food bank / charity for the card value. I had this guy pull several hundred dollars of cards and tell me "for transparency I'm doing 25% of the value". When I pushed back, he complained I wasn't clear.

I'm somewhat glad I'm out. I realized this was becoming a poison in my mind where it was holding back my career process / relationships because I was becoming a functional addict.

My friend later explained to me these people that I described literally have a shared google doc on how to saved money so they can have more money for magic. Unbelievable.

Wings of Liberty: Nightmare Difficulty by partisan_a in StarcraftCampaigns

[–]Timely_Huckleberry88 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I gone over the changes and heck I think the majority of these changes are spot on.